Star Trek followers worldwide mourned the passing of actress Nichelle Nichols on July 30, 2022, on the age of 89. As with each different actor related to the unique sequence of Star Trek, Nichols’s different private {and professional} roles have been doomed to be eclipsed by her participation in three seasons of the cult phenomenon present that went on to spawn an ever-increasing depend of movie sequels and spinoffs. I’m no biographer and can go away the duty of eulogizing Nichols as an individual to those that knew her and might correctly pay tribute. Like so many others, I knew her for that one function: Lieutenant Nyota Uhura.
After all, Uhura’s very existence as a personality was groundbreaking. Her place as a bridge officer in a future starship was symbolic of a world during which Black folks have been promoted as energetic contributors in competent {and professional} methods. So important was her symbolic function that, as Nichols would usually comment, Martin Luther King, Jr., himself insisted she stay as an actor within the present even when she grew disillusioned together with her small half in it. The end result of her involvement on the time got here in an in any other case unremarkable episode of Star Trek’s lackluster third season, “Plato’s Stepchildren,” during which William Shatner’s Captain Kirk kissed Uhura—maybe the primary black/white interracial kiss in tv historical past.
Rising up watching Star Trek reruns as a child and a teen, I didn’t actually know the historic or symbolic significance of Uhura. I solely knew that I preferred her, that she was somebody I’d need to hang around with—a sentiment shared by the remainder of the Enterprise crew. What Nichols did was to take a position her signature character with a vibrant life that transcended her comparative lack of display screen time, inhabiting a full vary of worthwhile human exercise.
In reality, her formal place wasn’t essentially the most glamorous function. As communications officer, her bridge scenes usually required her to ship generic traces; what number of methods are there to say, “Hailing frequencies open”? And although Star Trek was forward-thinking for its time, Uhura was nonetheless topic to among the extra dated points of the period, from the ever-present miniskirt worn by all feminine officers on the Enterprise to her tendency to be the primary one to scream in any given circumstance. Maybe because of this the most recent Trek incarnation, Unusual New Worlds, has consciously given Celia Rose Gooding a lot to do in her model of a cadet Uhura.
Every candy melody we heard from Uhura’s mouth… implied numerous hours on the finish of the workday that we by no means acquired to see however might actually think about.
Star Trek was before everything concerning the dynamics of the Huge Three, Captain Kirk, Commander Spock, and Physician McCoy. Their banter and interactions have been, certainly, a pleasant facet of the present. However since my youth, I’ve at all times beloved the obscure or second-string figures, so deep down, I used to be most within the less-emphasized members of the primary solid: Scotty, Sulu, Chekov, and, after all, Uhura. As a voracious collector of Star Trek tie-in novels, I particularly sought out these uncommon few which may function Uhura on the cowl, anxious to get any extra glimpse I might into her backstory.
The factor was, whereas there would possibly generally have been pressure among the many actors, anybody watching these early seasons of The Unique Sequence might inform that these junior officers beloved spending time collectively. And sometimes, you possibly can see that Uhura was one of many chief causes. However her poise and professionalism, the Uhura moments that stick out essentially the most to me are the instances she was off-duty. There’s her shore go away with Pavel Chekov during which she excitedly acquires the primary of the eponymous fuzzy alien pets in “The Bother with Tribbles.” There’s the second in “The Conscience of the King” when she agrees to sing for Lieutenant Riley to spare him from terminal boredom. There’s her hilarious participation within the drama the Enterprise crew staged to flee from the androids in “I, Mudd.”
That didn’t imply she couldn’t be fierce. Star Trek gave Nichols some alternatives to show her talents as a Starfleet officer. She might change stations to helm, navigation, or science as the necessity arose, and in “Who Mourns for Adonais?” she was capable of rewire a subspace bypass circuit. In Star Trek III, she held off Starfleet lengthy sufficient for Kirk to take again the previous Enterprise in an effort to avoid wasting Spock and McCoy. However maybe her most memorable moments got here in “Mirror, Mirror,” when she took on the persona of her violent alternate universe counterpart, enjoying cat-and-mouse with a villainous model of her buddy Sulu.
Whereas I want the present had supplied extra event for Nichelle Nichols to showcase her abilities, and I want we had been capable of study extra about Nyota Uhura all these a long time in the past, I’m not completely discontent with what we acquired. There was, certainly, one thing irresistibly tantalizing concerning the glimpses we did get, mixed with Nichols’s performances inside the Trek ensemble. They achieved what we hope for from nice fiction (particularly nice science fiction)—they instructed a better world, a world full of individuals united by frequent objective past their variations with out erasing these variations. “Heard melodies are candy,” John Keats as soon as wrote, “however these unheard / Are sweeter.”
Every candy melody we heard from Uhura’s mouth—whether or not “Past Antares” or “Oh, On the Starship Enterprise”—implied numerous hours on the finish of the workday that we by no means acquired to see however might actually think about. On the bridge, she was the communications officer, maybe a thankless job, however one which couldn’t have been extra acceptable to the importance of her picture on Nineteen Sixties tv display screen, an emblem of connection throughout boundaries which may have appeared insurmountable. On the very best days, she was an explorer, visiting unusual new worlds together with her comrades, serving to draw beings from radically totally different cultures collectively. In laborious instances, she might take issues into her personal arms, combating and fixing and mixing it up with the boys. However on the finish of her shift, Nichols made certain we knew that there was extra to her, that Uhura, whose title means “freedom,” had the boundless exercise of 1 who might benefit from the good issues of the universe and invite others to do the identical.
When Christians have a look at Christ’s actions in his personal day, we see him having fun with hospitality when it’s supplied to him and lengthening hospitality to these round him, nonetheless totally different they could be. On this regard, Star Trek’s Lieutenant Uhura bears a resemblance: she was a beneficiant particular person, a hospitable particular person, one who prolonged the hand of fellowship to these round her. In one other of her most memorable moments, on the finish of the episode “Bread and Circuses,” Uhura acknowledges one thing all of her crewmates have missed. After surviving on a world like our personal besides with Rome nonetheless in energy, Spock dismisses one non secular cult on the planet, a bunch of sun-worshipers, solely to be corrected by Uhura:
Spock: I want we might’ve examined that perception of his extra carefully. It appears illogical for a solar worshiper to develop a philosophy of complete brotherhood. Solar worship is often a primitive superstition faith.
Uhura: I’m afraid you might have all of it improper, Mister Spock, all of you. I’ve been monitoring a few of their old-style radio waves, the empire spokesman making an attempt to ridicule their faith. However he couldn’t. Don’t you perceive? It’s not the solar up within the sky. It’s the Son of God.
Kirk: Caesar—and Christ. That they had them each. And the phrase is spreading… solely now.
McCoy: A philosophy of complete love and complete brotherhood.
I don’t want to declare extra for a fictional character than what’s warranted. The Christian religion is, after all, a faith with content material and doctrine, usually derided as superstition. Nevertheless it stays at its greatest, at its most unanswerable, once we stay it out with magnificence and winsome communication, with generosity and hospitality—in brief, once we appear like Uhura.